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Blog Archives: May 2014

After the recent rains and with the advent of sunshine, I have mowed my lawn twice already. This can only mean one thing: Summer is upon us. Graduations, PCS season in the military, and vacation plans are all percolating in our community. This is also the season when worship attendance goes down, so you would expect a pastor to write a blog post titled something like, “Don’t take a vacation from church community!” Rather than write the traditional advice, I’d like to invite you to think about three different communities and how you might be ...

We believe the Bible, but we don’t read the Bible. That’s not our view of Scripture at GCC, but it may be the dominant view that we push back against.
A cultural battle regarding the Bible began in Europe about 150 years ago and peaked in this country after World War I. At that time a book was published called “The Five Fundamentals.” If you go to almost any evangelical church's website today and click though to the “What We Believe” page, you will find some theme and variations on a version of those five fundamentals:
1. the inerrancy ...

The fourth highest grossing movie of the past weekend was the movie Heaven is for Real, currently grossing $75 million. The movie is based on the bestselling book of the same title. It is true story about the 3-year-old son of a Christian pastor who claimed he had a near death experience during an operation. Because of its overtly Christian message, it is remarkable to me that they made a movie out of this particular story. I have not seen the movie, but I both read and listened to the book. I’ll tell you frankly that I loved the book. I ...

This week when I was preaching, I mixed together too many things from separate gospels and as a result there were two factual errors in my sermon. Thankfully, a few of you caught this and someone pointed it out to me. Talking about Jesus encounter with the rich man of Mark 10, I said that the Greek word translated “disheartened” described the rich man as he walked away from Jesus. I also said that this is the same word used to describe Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane in his anguish recorded by Luke.
To clarify, “sorrowful” is the word in ...